On to the next stop

Our time in Seattle draws to a close tonight (Tuesday) and early tomorrow morning we leave for Salt Lake City to visit Sarah's sister and her family for a few days. We have had a good time here - relaxing, running errands, visiting with family. And we think the family has had a good time getting to know our daughter. She was certainly the main attraction at an open house on Sunday. It was a mob of people and she seemed to be in every picture that was taken that day. Now we are mostly all on the right time schedule, though Dad and Mom still want to go to bed earlier than usual and then wake up earlier. Hopefully, as we move across the country and the time moves with us, we can get on the right schedule.

Aunt Lora bought Lexi a Halloween outfit. Isn't she a cute pumpkin? We didn't do any trick-or-treating though.

Back in the U.S.A.

We have officially left Geneva and are now in the U.S. for a visit. Alexandria did really well with the flights to Seattle. She managed to sleep for quite a while in her basinet on the plane and got lots of attention from other passengers. She was only fussy a little and eating helped that. Now the trouble is figuring out what time zone we are on. Lexi has been going to bed earlier than usual and therefore, thinking that 3:30 in the morning must be the time to get up. That makes it a bit hard on Mom and Dad who aren't sleeping well then either. I usually manage my jet lag through sleeping pills but have not been taking them. So I am hoping that within the next couple of days, we somehow manage to get back to a normal sleeping pattern.

It seems odd to be here - and odd to know that we won't be going back to Geneva. I don't think that will really hit us until we leave for Nairobi. TV here seems mostly ridiculous to me and yesterday at the grocery store, I expected to get my $3 in change back as coins - not bills. So there are definitely some cultural differences that we are noticing. I was also extremely surprised on Halloween and the number of adults in costumes. Haven't seen that in a long while.

Moving Day

Well, Alexandria is moving house for the first time - probably, the first of many times knowing her Dad and I. The packers are in today and will move everything out tomorrow. (When we did this in the US, they did it all in 1 day - does that make the Swiss slow or the Americans fast?) Time has worked out that we will get to spend about 3 weeks in the US visiting family and friends. We are doing a tour - Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago, Minneapolis and Iowa for Thanksgiving. If we are coming near you, we will try and see you - though we know we won't be able to see everyone.

Having my parents here to help with Lexi and the cleaning was a god-send. I really don't think we would have been ready without them. The baby needs someone on call for most hours of the day.

We leave Geneva on Tuesday morning. We already feel that we will be loaded down with luggage and have joined the ranks of those annoying families who get in your way with all of their luggage, kids and kid accoutrements. This will be Lexi's first time in an airplane. I am praying that she likes it! She has been very good lately - not all that fussy - so we are hoping that continues.

After our whirlwind tour of the US, we leave for Nairobi on the day after Thanksgiving. That will be two 8.5 hour flights with a 6 hour break in Amsterdam. We hope to get in a shower and a nap in that time.

I think I am really looking forward to this next adventure of ours. I am starting to get quite excited. We have a house lined up - 4 bedrooms - so you can come visit! We are taking it over from an American who is moving to Uganda. It's not far from where I work so I may even be able to come home at lunch time. We may also be getting house help which seems bizarre, but may work out well if Stephen finds part-time or even full-time work. He will be responsible to Lexi as well.

Next you hear from us will probably be from North America!

Creating memories with Grandma and Grandpa

Sarah's parents have been visiting for almost two weeks. They have been enjoying getting to know Lexi and spending time with her. They have been reading books to her (even attempting to read some of the French ones aloud), helping to change diapers, and generally being helpful in watching her, which has allowed Sarah and me to get a lot of things done.

One of the reasons Paula and Leroy came to visit was to be here for Lexi's baptism, which was yesterday at our church. Leroy, an ELCA pastor, helped perform the baptism with our pastor. It was a meaninful service of baptism and a special day for Lexi and the rest of us. Another baby boy, the son of some other members in the congregation, was baptized at the same time, so there were a lot of people around the font. I did some work to personalize and customize the service. Each family had obtained water from parts of the world that were somehow significant to them, so we had water from five different places:

• Puget Sound, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean that Seattle sits on, where Stephen grew up



• the Mississippi River, to represent Sarah's roots in the Midwest



• the Elbe River in Germany, birthplace of the other boy's mother



• Lake Geneva, the body of water that we all currently live by



• the Jordan River, which has significance to all Christians

As a gift to Lexi, I played the prelude on the organ, and Paula played a piece on the organ as well at the beginning of communion.

Lexi behaved quite well during the baptism. She cried a little when the water was placed on her head, but then she quickly calmed down. She looked so pretty in the long white dress she wore, which was the same dress that Stephen's maternal grandmother wore for her baptism 92 years ago and which subsequent generations, including Stephen himself, have worn for their baptisms.

Lexi's sponsors/godparents are Stephen's two older siblings, who live in Seattle and New York. Because each of them came to meet Lexi in September, they were not able to come back for the baptism. Therefore, we asked a third sponsor, a friend of ours from Chicago who is a member of our congregation here and whom we've known well since we arrived (Bill Strehlow, husband of Karen Bloomquist), to represent the other two. After the water was put on her head, Lexi sat in the arms of Sarah's mother and grinned for a minute or two at Bill, who was standing next to her.

(See pictures of the baptism by clicking on the link at the upper right of this page.)

Otherwise, Lexi is still a good-natured and happy baby. She is still smiling a lot and quite easily. When you look at her and talk to her, she'll smile back at you. She's also turning into quite the chatterbox. She's developing some additional sounds, although when I make the same sounds back to her, as if I'm talking to her in the same "language," she looks at me like I'm strange. She's doing a lot more of the sound that sounds much like a Geiger counter, a sort of continuous grunting. Tonight at dinner, while she was lying alone on the couch and the rest of us were two arms' lengths away at the table, she was taking long breaths and making this sound on and on and seemed able to entertain herself quite well doing this.

Grandma and Grandpa have been dividing their time between watching Lexi and doing a thorough cleaning of our apartment as we pack up all our things and get ready to move out of Geneva. At just a few months old, Lexi will be a well-traveled baby. She will visit most of her relatives in the U.S. before moving with us to our new home in Nairobi.

Happy two-month birthday, Lexi!

Lexi is two months old today! That's a relatively short amount of time, but we feel like so much has happened and that we've learned so much about parenthood in this period.

How do I feel after caring for an infant for two months? Well, look at the picture to the left. It shows Joseph - you know, the one from the nativity scene on the night Jesus was born. We saw this painting (of the whole nativity scene) at the Abondance Abbey in the French Alps near Geneva, which we visited one Saturday afternoon this summer. It was painted in the 15th century. It's funny how the new father Joseph is depicted - how tired and resigned he looks. And this was just on the first night with his new child! Like us, he was away from his home and had dealt with some early visitors who had come to see the new baby.

Do I feel like this? Well, fortunately, no. Quite the opposite, I'm pleased to say. We are lucky to have a good-natured and generally calm baby. She has been a joy to be with, get to know and care for.

At this two-month mark, Lexi has entered a new phase of awareness and interaction with us. She can fix her gaze for a few seconds on people or things and pay attention a little more. We're starting to set her up in the car seat while we're doing things - in the kitchen while we're making dinner or eating or in a room while we're working on something. She's getting better at observing what's going on and sitting quietly for longer periods without getting fussy and needing to be held.

But most fun and fulfilling of all, she is starting to smile at us. Sometimes all it takes to get a smile is just looking at her. But it's most fun for me to playfully poke her and make little noises. She likes this type of interaction. It's hard to describe this feeling, but it melts my heart and makes me feel that she's somehow telling me that she acknowledges that she belongs to me - she recognizes me as someone who can please her and make her happy, at least.

So far, then, at two months, fatherhood has been good to me, and parenthood for us has been a fulfilling time.

Vaccinations

Well, Stephen and I went to the travel clinic on Thursday to make sure we were up-to-date on our vaccinations (we weren't - Stephen had 3 shots, I got 2) and Alexandria went on Friday for her two-month appointment and her vaccinations. And yes, everyone felt them - though only Lexi wailed her head off. Since we are taking her to Africa, she got an extra shot - the one for TB, I think - that in this day and age, babies in the US and Europe do not normally get. She ended up with three bandaids - 1 on each leg and 1 on her arm.

The doctor said Lexi might be a little fussier or get a fever or maybe want to sleep a lot. While she got a little warm, she didn't have a fever of note and it's hard to say if she was a lot fussier than normal. But she's had a lot more poopy diapers than usual. We are hoping that is shot related and gets back to normal soon!

On the stats side, she is very close to weighing 5 kilos and is 2 cm longer than she was 5 weeks ago. All other systems are working well.

'Who's this strange man?'

As many of you know, I have just been on a self-organized and self-guided tour of the cities, towns and villages in Germany that figured prominently in the lives of both Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach. I had a wonderful time, by the way, and saw everything I had wanted to see - although it was a lot of old, historic houses (including one castle - Wartburg), churches and statues. I now feel like I've gotten a Master's degree in Reformation history, so let me know if you want to chat about this sometime, and we can argue about how Luther influenced all of Western civilization.

Anyway, I was supposed to take this eight-day trip in late July, but Sarah was late in her pregnancy, and we had just been through the unexpected process of turning the baby, and Sarah was worried about the rest of the pregnancy. So I postponed the trip and found time last week to squeeze it in before we leave Europe. Sarah was still gracious enough to let me do it in late September, even though we now had a baby on our hands.

Even on the evening of the same day I left, I was missing Lexi, and every day on the trip was hard being away from her. Immediateily when I got home, I picked her up to hold her, and she took a look at me and started to cry - one of those "I'm afraid" type of cries. Indeed, I think she forgot who I was. But I do realize that being gone for a week in the life of someone who's really only seven short weeks old is a long time. It's like if you were 70 and your father had been absent for a whole decade somewhere in the middle of your life. You might forget him too or at least write him off!

But after a few kisses and cuddles, I think she warmed up to me again and remembered that I was not there to harm her.

To Lexi, my eight days in Germany were a long period in her short lifetime. Even though I consider it a short period, it seems that newborns can change noticably in just a handful of days. The shape of her face has changed a bit, as it has been doing since she was born. And I think she's developed her scream quite well - she can do a pretty long and smooth and loud wail now right in her throat with her vocal chords, rather than a series of short whimpers from her belly. She might be ready to join the choir at church now!

Well, now that I've discovered and connected with one of the "fathers" of my faith/denomination, it's good to return home and be a father myself to my girl again.